Retrospection of the iPhone Developer Conference 2009

The German iPhone Developer Conference in Cologne (01-02 December) was an exciting event that started with a very informative keynote by Maximilian Reiß who elaborated the tide of iPhone events of the last years. From there, nearly 200 attendees were invited to join business-related presentations and developer-oriented talks on separated tracks over the next two days.

Nearly 200 attendees, 29 talks on 2 days and 3 winners of the best German iPhone App contest at the iPhone Developer Conference in Cologne

I had the chance to introduce the iPhonical project that applies model-driven techniques to produce parts of iPhone applications automatically. The presentation first describes a way to separate generated code from manually written source with the Objective-C concept of categories. From there, I demonstrated that even with powerful frameworks such as ObjectiveResource (an adapter to connect iPhone apps with Rails applications) one can benefit from code generation. With the help of the iPhonical DSL (implemented with Xtext) keeping data-centric classes in sync with the web application was way easier than coding them by hand.

The iPhoneDevCon was a very informative event. Many passionated developers or leads, growing studios and enthusiastic marketing representatives shared their ideas and during the breaks you could easily discuss different viewpoints of today’s opportunities and approaches.

Writing an article like the one you have just read takes me quite an amount of my personal time.
Way too often, I invest this time in different interests and decide against another blog post.
On the other hand, you can motivate me with your feedback, your thoughts and your ideas.
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Heiko Behrens

is a programmer, author, and public speaker with more than a decade of commercial software development, technical writing, and on-stage presentation experience. As an active committer at Eclipse and as an involved participant in numerous other open source projects, he has in-depth experience in a broad range of technologies. His startup BeamApp, still in stealth mode, is focussed on mobile application development, both native cross-platform and web-based.